Abstract

Moving toward equitable, inclusive, and sustainable futures requires new and evolved approaches to conducting human-computer interaction research.

This requires that we, as academics, practitioners, and policymakers take on more community-engaged approaches to our work and tap into unheard populations who remain voiceless in popular and academic discourses. Such voices offer brilliant insights into technology’s potential, ethics, and future.

This study draws from two such cases, one speculative design study and a photovoice study in collaboration with two Detroit community organizations. Through these two cases, we unpack how we engage communities in reenvisioning technological infrastructure, particularly our safety infrastructures. In this talk, we will discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of redesigning and rethinking surveillance infrastructure when considering their voices.

Bio

Tawanna Dillahunt

Tawanna Dillahunt is the 2022–2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and holds a courtesy appointment with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She leads the Social Innovations Group (SIG), an interdisciplinary group of individuals whose vision is to design, build, and enhance technologies to solve real-world problems affecting marginalized groups and individuals primarily in the U.S. Her current projects aim to address unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy by fostering social and socio-technical capital within these communities. At Radcliffe, she is working to explore and raise the visibility of alternative economic futures for Black and Brown Detroiters.

Tawanna is an ACM Distinguished Member and an inaugural Skip Ellis Early Career Award recipient. She holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. in Computer Science from the Oregon Health and Science University, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University. She was also a software engineer in Intel Corporation’s Desktop Board and LAN Access Divisions for several years.

Alex Jiahong Lu

Alex Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Alex’s past work looks into how data-driven surveillance infrastructures come into being and their harms in varied sociopolitical contexts on different scales, particularly policing surveillance in the city of Detroit, behavior management in the classroom setting, and ideology control in China. Working alongside two communities in Eastside Detroit, his dissertation examines the history and imaginaries of surveillance infrastructures in Detroit through an affective lens. Through arts- and community-based participatory approaches, he is working with residents to make their everyday negotiation with surveillance infrastructures visible and envision alternative sociotechnical infrastructures for preferable futures.

Alex holds an MSW degree from the University of Michigan School of Social Work and a B.E. in Information Engineering and Media from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Alex worked with Meta’s Community Growth Team as a UX researcher intern last summer, and he will be on the job market next year for both academic and industry positions.

An Invitation

Did you know that BostonCHI has been in continuous operation for over 35 years? The past few years have been markedly different from all the rest, with the move from gathering in person, to gathering online. And now, it’s time to change again.

BostonCHI invites you to join us in shaping our journey ahead.

In this online workshop, we’ll run through a series of enjoyable interactive activities on a digital whiteboard, to help us answer the question: where will BostonCHI go next?

Schedule – EST (UTC-5)

6:45 – 7:00: introduction

Kick off the meeting with some light intro activities

7:00 – 7:15: the journey up to now

• Build up a collaborative journey map of BostonCHI over time
• What has worked well during the pandemic years?
• What has worked well for in-person events?

7:15 – 7:45: possible futures

Brainstorm where BostonCHI might go next, looking at topics such as:

• Future event formats
• Potential themes, topics, and speakers for next year’s talks
• Connecting and growing the community
• Member experience

7:45 – 8:00: a look inside the steering committee

• Steering themes for the year
• Operational updates; how the steering committee is organized
• Open roles and opportunities

What if you could generate excitement about delivering great user experiences without having to explain what UX is?

Imagine this: you’re talking with your development and product partners about UX outcomes and they understand the value in starting with the end-in-mind. Not only do they understand, they are excited about what will happen in your users’ and customers’ lives because you’ve delivered a great UX – together.

In this session, you’ll uncover the proven secrets behind sparking enthusiasm for delivering great UX. You’ll discover how an outcome-driven approach is a game changer for UX leaders like yourself.

You’ll explore how to:

… Identify the outcomes that best spark excitement amongst the developers, product managers, and stakeholders you work with every day.

… Scope your outcomes to push your team to take on challenges they’ve resisted in the past.

… Show what it means to be ready-to-ship through the lens of great user experiences.

Venue

This online event will be held in Zoom.

About Jared Spool

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services.

In the 43 years he’s been in the tech field, Jared has worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.

For 23 years, Jared was the conference chair and keynote speaker at the now retired annual UI Conferences and UX Immersion Conferences; Jared still manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is a co-author of Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.

You’ll find Jared’s writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on Twitter at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.

This is a joint event of GBC/ACM, BostonCHI, and the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.